The definition of the Jones polynomial of tangles (a la Reshetikhin and Turaev) uses the space of invariants for $U_q sl_2$ and R-matrices. It seems to me the same thing cane be done in terms of the ...

Morton and Cromwell showed that the famous mutant pair, Kinoshita-Terasaka and Conway knots, can be distinguished by HOMFLY polynomials colored by [2,1] Young diagram. Are there any other mutant pairs ...

The Jones polynomial is known to have many different interpretations or definitions, by now. There are connections with QFT, quantum groups, Hilbert schemes, Cherednik algebras, etc.
My question is ...

A Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev (WRT) Invariant $\tau_{M,L}^G(\xi)\in\mathbb{C}$ is an invariant of closed oriented 3-manifold $M$ containing a framed link $L$, where $G$ is a simple Lie group, and $\xi$ ...

I've been calculating some Jones polynomials lately and I was just curious if there was a physical meaning to evaluating the Jones polynomial at a particular value of $t$.
For example, if I take the ...

Let $\Sigma$ be a surface with non-empty boundary labelled by finitely many points $x_i$.
For our purposes a spine $s$ for $\Sigma$ is a uni-trivalent graph embedded in $\Sigma$ whose 1-vertices are ...

The Kontsevich integral is known to be a universal Vassiliev invariant.
It is still an open question whether it is a complete knot invariant, i.e. whether it distinguishes a given knot from all other ...

I have two questions to obtain the explicit forms of A-polynomials.
Takata used the mathematica pacage qMultisum.m to obtain the recursion relation of the colored Jones polynomials for twist knots. ...

Soon after his famous paper "A categorification of the Jones polynomial", Khovanov
introduced a "bordered" version. His theory assingns to every oriented even tangle
a complex of (H_n,H_m)-bimodules, ...

Hi all! Why are skein modules 1-dimensional on closed 3-manifolds? The result seems clear on closed manifolds with vanishing first Betti number (e.g. $S^3$), but I don't see how to prove it for, say, ...

Fix an integer $n$. What can you say about a (not necessarily square) matrix $A$ with integer entries that has the property that for any $k$, every $k\times k$ minor of $A$ is divisible by $n^{k-1}$? ...

A week or so ago, I was saddened to read Jim Stasheff's post on the AlgTop mailing list, announcing the passing of Colin Day, after a long bout with cancer.
I was thinking of reading Colin Day's PhD ...

Noah Snyder gave a great answer to this question about different versions of a quantum group $U_q(\mathfrak g)$ when $q$ is a root of unity. I want to ask about forms of the deformed coordinate ring ...

The Kauffman bracket skein module $K_t(F\times I)$ (where $t$ is an indeterminant and $F$ is a closed surface) is an associative algebra (the operation being "stacking" links in the $I$ direction). ...

Let $H_q(n)$ denote the Hecke algebra associated to the symmetric group $S(n)$: this is the $\mathbb{Z}[q^{\pm 1/2}]$ algebra generated by $T_1, \ldots, T_{n-1}$ satisfying the braid relations along ...

...what can I do with the darn thing?
Background: I read that still no Vassiliev Invariant with mutant-discriminating
power is known (correct me if this is outdated). Now, my research lead to a
whole ...

The V.I. definition goes doublepoint=overpass-underpass (or was it the other
way around? If it's 50:50, I score 0 always :-). Would it lead anywhere
to define doublepoint=overpass+underpass? (Even if ...

The volume conjecture, a formula relating hyperbolic volume of a knot complement with the semiclassical limit of a family of coloured Jones polynomials, is widely considered the biggest open problem ...

Reidermeister's theorem states that the set of knots, modulo ambient isotopy, is isomorphic to the planar algebra generated by crossings, modulo Reidemeister moves. This planar algebra presentation is ...

This question is a clumsy attempt to apply a certain analogy. I hope that if the answer is negative it comes with a clarification of the scope and limitations of the analogy.
Arithmetic topology is ...

Can one use the real lie algebra so(3) to get knot polynomials? If so, do they have a skein relation (I presume they would, if they come from R-matrices in some standard way. If so, is the R-matrix ...

This question might turn out not to make any sense, but here it is: Witten's (and Reshetikhin and Turaev's) 3-manifold invariant can be "defined" as an integral over the space of connections on the ...